Dusty Ricketts: Creative thinking needed to solve Panhandle's affordable housing crisis | Opinion

COMMENTARY | By the mid-2000s, Okaloosa County was facing a crisis. Homelessness had grown to become a major issue. There was no shelter on the south end of the county and services to help these people were split up among different agencies.

Around 2006, the issue had become so prevalent that the Greater Fort Walton Beach Chamber, area nonprofits, churches, law enforcement agencies, and municipal and county governments started working together to try to find a solution.

It took a lot of hard work, but by November 2016, the One Hopeful Place homeless shelter opened and has continued to expand its services ever since with the help of many people and groups.

Okaloosa housing market: Fort Walton Beach-area home prices fall 3.3% in May, with houses for sale in high demand

Proposed solution: Are tiny homes the solution to Walton's workforce housing issue? Seaside developer thinks so

Lack of housing: 42 employees short: Destin needs workers but many can't afford to live there

Now in 2022, the community is facing another crisis and we need that kind of action again.

The crisis we're facing now is the price of rental housing, which has gotten so out of hand that it's a challenge for people in the service industry or just starting out to find a place to rent they can afford.

When I first moved to Northwest Florida in November 2002, I initially moved in with some friends from Indiana who were living on Okaloosa Island. The next year, I got my first apartment. It was on Monahan Drive in Fort Walton Beach, had a nice view of the Choctawhatchee Bay if you didn't mind looking at a dumpy houseboat or the laundry building to see the water.

I paid $425 a month for that one-bedroom apartment until Hurricane Ivan came along and ripped off its roof. That was more than I was wanting to pay, but I could afford it on my salary as a reporter at The Destin Log.

But that was almost 20 years ago. Nowadays, you would be hard to find a room for rent in Fort Walton Beach for $425 a month. In fact, most rooms for rent in Fort Walton listed on roomies.com are going for double that amount and more.

Outrageous inflation we've all been dealing with the past year or two has certainly contributed to the rental rate increases, just about everything is more expensive now.

I think a bigger factor causing rates to increase so much locally is the military and its Basic Allowance for Housing. The BAH isn't a bad thing necessarily and our airmen and soldiers certainly deserve it and more for their service.

But according to the BAH calculator on DefenseTravel Management Office's website, the estimated BAH allowance for a private with no dependents in the 32548 zip code is $1,599 a month. That amount goes up to $1,965 if they have dependents.

If I had rental property, why wouldn't I charge at least $1,599 a month if I knew everyone at Eglin could afford that with their BAH allowance alone?

Unfortunately, charging that much for rent prices out so many people.

We've experienced that issue here at the Northwest Florida Daily News. Earlier this year we hired a new reporter who was going to be moving from out of state. They could not find an apartment or house to rent they could afford and had to back out on starting.

Journalism has never been one of the higher paying industries. We know that going into it, but we do it because we love the industry and keeping the public informed. But our staff always has been able to afford to live here in the past.

Finding a solution to the outrageous rental prices is going to be difficult. Probably just as difficult as tackling the homeless issue a decade ago. And like that problem, it probably never truly will be resolved, but we've got to come together to find ways to improve the issue.

The county and municipalities have started to address the issue, creating committees to study the problem and working with developers to offer more affordable options. That is a good start, but we need more outside-the-box ideas.

Last month, one of Jim Thompson's final stories before he retired was talking with Andres Duany, the architect and urban planner who designed the Walton County community of Seaside. Duany's current focus is on finding solutions to the affordable housing issue, with his proposal focusing on a new take on the tiny houses.

Duany's structures are easily portable, can be built elsewhere and brought to the community and placed on raw land or even in parking lots. Duany's company, No Nonsense Housing Company, has developed a 400-square-foot living space that can accommodate as many as four people, offers two bedrooms, two full baths and space for a washer and dryer.

Duany was in Seaside talking to business owners there about purchasing the $80,000 tiny homes and offering them to prospective employees as an incentive to come work for them.

As area counties and municipalities get more serious about tackling the affordable housing issue, I hope they consider Duany's project and other out-of-the-box solutions.

Dusty Ricketts is the content coach for the Northwest Florida Daily News. He can be reached at dricketts@nwfdailynews.com.

This article originally appeared on Northwest Florida Daily News: Affordable housing becoming a major issue in Northwest Florida